


Not-Quite Daughter

by gwinne



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-28 23:25:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15060095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwinne/pseuds/gwinne
Summary: Wouldn't Scully have thought about Emily during her pregnancy?And also, trying to make sense of Mulder's behavior during "Three Words" and "Empedocles" (written back in 2001, with no knowledge of episodes that followed)





	Not-Quite Daughter

NOT-QUITE DAUGHTER

She's not surprised to see Emily bouncing at the foot of  
her bed, asking if she can have pancakes for breakfast.   
"Can I, Mommy, please?"

Before she can wake enough to say, "stop jumping," she  
realizes the only thing bouncing is the baby, using her  
ribcage as a springboard. And she's alone in her mahogany  
bed. That fateful Christmas at Bill's, when Tara was ready  
to burst out of her blue dress, she asked Mom whether boys  
or girls kick harder. Tough little girl, Scully says to  
this child who, she vows, will never wear pink lace or play  
with a Barbie doll.

And in this long year when anything seems possible--visions  
in Buddhist temples and miraculous conceptions and lovers  
coming back from the dead--an apparition of a not-quite  
daughter is hardly fodder for concern.

* * *

It's just her in the office this morning, and she decides  
the filing cabinets could stand a little organizing before  
she goes on maternity leave and the next generation does  
irrevocable damage to what little logic there is. Doggett  
made a mess of things early that fall while she was too  
preoccupied with morning sickness and prenatal checkups to  
guard Mulder's carefully cultivated system, where Donnie  
Pfaster and the Flukeman exist side by side.

After that bloody, confusing mess of a case that Doggett  
eventually dubbed "the Butt genie," she looked everywhere  
for the Pusher file. The parallel, she insisted, was  
clear: a killer who tricked the eye into believing he was a  
harmless child and a killer who wrote "pass" on a nametag  
to gain admittance to the Hoover building. And she knew,  
with the same certainty that Mulder used to describe "the  
whammy," where the folder was supposed to be. Or, at least  
she did BD. Before Doggett. When he finally showed up to  
work, cocky and sarcastic, she made sure he'd never  
misplace another file. 

Now that Mulder's breathing and walking again, she doesn't  
hesitate to do what she's wanted to do for so long--impose  
any amount of order--so when he calls and says, "hey,  
Scully," and asks her to find something about psychokinesis  
or black magic or whatever he's into this week, she'll know  
exactly where to look. 

After three hours she has a backache and the beginnings of  
a database, cases cross-listed and easily obtainable by  
keyword rather than case number. Fluky and assorted ooky  
things, ghosts, apparitions, ESP. 

"Doesn't nesting ordinarily involve large quantities of  
baked goods and doll-sized undershirts?" Mulder says,  
appearing from nowhere and gesturing to the stacks of file  
folders threatening to tumble from every surface and heaped  
on the floor at her feet. In her third trimester lethargy,  
reviewing old reports is much more pleasurable than putting  
them back.

"What are you doing here, Mulder?"

"Well, seeing as it's lunchtime, I thought I'd take my best  
girl for a hamburger." He shrugs, the collar of his  
leather jacket bunching at the ears.

"Best girl?"

"Partner. Soul mate. One in five billion. You get the  
drift." He bends over and picks up a file, flips through  
it absently, then tosses it on the stack on her desk.

"Yeah, give me a minute." She makes a few last notes on  
the yellow legal pad, too aware of Mulder up against her  
back. His hands are on her shoulders, kneading gently.   
She doesn't know whether to be touched or infuriated. One  
minute he's the sarcastic flirt she was first partnered  
with and the next he's the doting lover she remembers from  
the spring. Her own mood swings are bad enough.

"I missed you last night."

He can't keep doing this to her. "Mulder," she chastises,  
"we had an agreement." She's not sure if she's referring  
to the rule about no touching in the office or the decision  
to stay in separate apartments on work nights or both. In  
this post-resurrection world, none of the old rules seem to  
apply.

* * *

"What do you know about the spirits of dead children  
haunting their families?" she asks, setting down her heavy  
glass. This is comfortable and familiar, asking him the  
wildest question she can think of while they drink  
milkshakes and wait for their food. She missed this  
routine more than she missed sex. 

Mulder wipes a smear of chocolate from her mouth, and she  
can't help but smile when he licks his finger. "You mean  
like that Charlie Holvey case?" 

"Sort of."

"This for something you and Dogboy are working on?" He  
stiffens a bit, and she wants to tell him that he shouldn't  
be threatened. How could a working relationship of less  
than six months even compare to a partnership of eight  
years? Only to Kersh, with his doctored statistics, do she  
and John Doggett make a noteworthy team. There's no number  
big enough to quantify how much she loves Mulder, how much  
she grieved for him while he was gone. Why can't he see  
that?

"No." She says it carefully, letting him hold the weight  
of that single syllable.

"So it's a personal inquiry then?" His words are measured,  
and she thinks, not for the first time, how much their  
conversations resemble chess, every word strategized.

"Yes." Slowly, she exhales. She can't bring herself to  
look at him right now, so she examines the saltshaker like  
evidence at a crime scene.

"About Emily." 

Now she pretends to be transfixed by a catsup smudge.   
"Yes."

"Wanna fill me in? It's hard to banter when you limit your  
replies to yes and no." 

Scully hears the frustration in his voice. After eight  
years as partners and several months as lovers, they still  
aren't good at this type of conversation, when they can't  
hide behind disciplinary jargon and empty rhetoric. This  
is her life they are talking about. No, she corrects  
herself, their life.

"I woke up about 5:00 this morning and Emily was jumping on  
my bed asking for pancakes. Now, it's widely reported in  
medical literature that pregnant women often experience  
nightmares and strange dreams. Stress, combined with  
hormones and irregular sleep patterns go along way for  
accounting for what I saw. . ."

Mulder chuckles and lays his right hand over hers. "Talk  
to me, Scully."

Deep breath, she tells herself, put those childbirth  
classes to good use. "I'm just trying to figure this all  
out, Mulder. Where she fits in. What kind of picture this  
kid is going to draw in kindergarten when they ask her to  
draw her family. I mean, does she have a big sister? Is  
she an only child? What do I tell her about her  
grandparents, for that matter?" She hears her voice  
getting louder, more agitated. She realizes, with a  
glaring certainty, that this was the question she wanted to  
ask all along.

"Not to mention her father."

"I didn't mean for us to get into that now, but, well,  
yes."

* * *

That first morning home, missing a molly and nearly six  
months of his life, he said he didn't know where he fit in.  
She wasn't sure either. During her worst bouts of nausea  
and melancholy, she believed--in the way that Mulder so  
often believed, without evidence or reason--that he'd come  
home and they'd buy a house and raise the baby together.   
Shivering beside Skinner at Mulder's funeral, she started  
thinking about what she'd tell her child about her father,  
how she'd be a good single mother. 

"There are support groups, Dana," her mother said, "for  
women like you." 

"Career women whose partners aid in miraculous conceptions  
and then disappear off the face of the planet?" 

"No, groups of single mothers. I know someone from church.  
You could talk to her."

She hadn't chosen to be single, but that day when Mulder  
agreed to donate sperm, she knew she was choosing to raise  
a child alone. How could PTA meetings compete with lights  
in the sky? By the time they became lovers, almost a year  
later, she'd given up on the idea of a baby. When Mulder  
finally reminded her, spooned against her backside in an  
Oregon motel, he spoke of all that had been taken away from  
her, not from them. The distinction was crucial. And now  
that he's back, neither one of them knows what kind of  
family they will hobble together, a mom, a dad, one  
controlling grandmother, and a crazy godfather for each day  
of the work week. 

It took almost a full week for them to discuss how she got  
pregnant in the first place; for once, Langly's  
tactlessness paid off. After the Gunmen took their laptops  
and left, they sat wordlessly at her kitchen table. Scully  
watched as Mulder drew patterns in the condensation on his  
iced tea glass. When he finally looked up, she saw the  
same uncertainty as the moment, almost two years before,  
when she asked him to help her conceive. "Well, Scully,  
inquiring minds want to know. What was involved in a  
certain blessed event?"

Keep it light, Dana, she told herself. "To the best of my  
knowledge, it was either Caddyshack and Shiner Bock or  
Steel Magnolias and merlot."

"You're saying that we did this." But you're sterile, she  
heard him say, like the teenager who protested, but Dad, we  
only did it once.

"Unless Eddie van Blundt escaped from prison and  
impersonated you again, yes." She knew she was hiding, as  
he often did, behind the almost impenetrable facade of  
wisecracks. She just wanted to make it easier for them  
both.

"How?" 

With that single word, she knew he never really wanted a  
baby, just got caught up in her hormonal excitement and the  
risks of the unknown.

"Didn't your dad explain the birds and the bees? Can't you  
just be happy, Mulder? This is the one thing I'd rather  
not question." For a man who literally came back from the  
dead, he was having an awfully hard time confronting the  
everyday miracle of parenthood. When he opened his eyes  
for the first time in that hospital bed, she wanted to  
believe this was something he would accept on simple faith.

"I am happy, Scully. I know how much this baby means to  
you. I'm just. . ."

"Just what?"

"Trying to catch up."

"I see." It's too much too soon. She'd rather they not  
talk about this than have him destroy every fantasy she  
created while he was gone.

"Scully, when you asked me to father your child, what were  
you really asking?"

"Just that. For you to be the father of my child." Why  
does it matter? That child was supposed to be hers; this  
child was theirs, created, as her mother once explained to  
her, out of the love shared between a man and a woman. And  
for a single heart-wrenching moment, she wondered how much  
he remembered from last spring. 

"In what way? In the way that you were Emily's mother?" 

She felt his words like a blow to the head. He was the one  
who winced.

* * *

"When I was a baby, did I live in your tummy too?" Emily's  
face is pressed against her abdomen, thumb in her rosebud  
mouth.

"When you were very little."

"Like Thumb-a-blina?" It takes her a moment to get the  
reference, that nursery school story about little girl who  
lived in a thimble. She'll need to relearn the logic of a  
child.

"No, sweetie, even smaller than Thumbalina."

"Why did you let me go?" Emily coils around her belly and  
squeezes. Pain slices through her like a gunshot.

* * *

When she opens her eyes, there's a fetal monitor strapped  
to her abdomen and a nurse checking an IV. "Get some rest,  
honey, the doctor will be in to see you soon." She's  
grateful for the baby's rhythmic kicks. The kid has  
Mulder's sense of timing, she thinks, that uncanny knack of  
his for showing up just as Eddie van Blundt leans in to  
kiss her, just as Donnie Pfaster prepares her last bath,  
just as her uterus threatens to split in two.

"Nurse," she calls with someone else's voice, "my partner?"  
but the door is already closed. She watches her baby's  
heart rate rise and fall, and she reminds herself that she  
loves this man who brings her a family keepsake but can't  
bring himself to tell the nurse that he's her family.   
"Partner" is such a perfect and inadequate word to describe  
him.

* * *

She blinks a few times to clear the sleep from her eyes.   
"Mulder?" she says into the shadows by the window. "What  
are you doing?"

He's shifting restlessly from foot to foot, arms pretzeled  
across his chest. He's on edge, and she can't be the  
strong one right now. "Sorry," he says softly. "I didn't  
mean to wake you."

"What time is it?" Her head feels thick from the  
medication, and it's hard to breathe, even with the nasal  
canula. 

"Just after three."

"Mulder?" she asks again. "What are you still doing here?"

He doesn't answer, but moves across the room and sits on  
the edge of her bed. "When they first brought you in here,  
the nurse wouldn't let me stay with you." He pauses and  
smoothes back her hair. "Because I'm not your husband."   
He touches one finger to the center of her chest. "You're  
my everything, Scully. You're all I have." 

She hears the catch in his voice and holds her breath. 

"But I don't know how to be a family."

Well, there it is. She pictures a white crib collapsing  
and a baby falling to the ground. "A family isn't  
something you are, Mulder, it's something you work towards,  
become a part of."

For only the second time, he spreads his fingers across her  
belly like a basketball. In the light coming from under  
the door, she wants to see the same wonder in his eyes as  
she did earlier that day, when she told him she was going  
to be okay. Instead, she sees something more apprehensive  
than his panic face.

"This baby needs a father, Scully."

"Yes, she does."

"But I don't know if I can be the kind of father she  
needs." She hates when he gets this way, self-pitying and  
morose, but it's nice to know the old Mulder is in there,  
behind all his insecure jokes about the Pizza Man.

"You're the father she has."

* * *

She puts her blue pajamas back on and lets him tuck her  
into bed, on her left side with more pillows than she knew  
she owned. He rubs the satiny material at her shoulder,  
and she almost stops breathing when he slips a finger into  
the open collar to caress her shoulder blade. The last  
time he touched her like this they were standing in his  
doorway, Skinner waiting for a taxi out front. Don't  
worry, Scully, he said, just a quick trip to the forest. 

"I'll be in the other room," he says softly and drops a  
kiss just above her right eyebrow. "You'll call me if you  
need anything?" This is the man she loves, with the list  
from her doctor in his pocket, what to do in case of  
bleeding or cramps. He missed out on sonograms in 3-D and  
the thrill of a first kick, but he's back to play the hero  
when everything threatens to fall apart. Yes, he assured  
the doctor, I'll stay with her. Yes, I'll make sure she  
rests. 

They still have living quarters, his funeral, and a birth  
plan to discuss. And she's not sure she'll ever know what  
to say about Emily. Somehow, though, she feels more secure  
than she has in months.

"Mulder," she says in this new, sleepy half-voice, "stay."

* * *

She sees the scene clearly. She's sitting on the couch  
with the little girl pressed up against her. A thick photo  
album rests on her belly, and she swears the baby is trying  
to kick it off.

"Do you know who this is?" she asks the little girl,  
pointing at the pre-schooler in a party dress.

"Me!" the girl shrieks.

"No," she says and points to a different girl in a  
different party dress, blowing out candles on a birthday  
cake. "This is you. This girl's name is Emily. She was  
your big sister. And this," she places the child's hand  
against the baby's roving foot, "is your little sister."

* * *

She puts the doll back in its box. She imagines the woman  
who will never be her mother-in-law rolling over in her  
grave. Only to her son, the sentimental bachelor, do  
family heirlooms and greasy pizza belong on the same table.

"There's a file folder in my top dresser drawer. Will you  
get it?" 

He looks at her quizzically. "You ran out of room at the  
office so you started the X-Files annex in your underwear  
drawer?"

She laughs softly and puts both hands on her belly. She'll  
keep them there permanently if it means she can hold this  
baby in her body for another seven weeks.

"Save me some pizza, will you?" She can tell he's learning  
to enjoy this part of her pregnancy already. It's an  
X-File, Scully. A man comes back from the dead and his  
tofu-eating partner remembers how to appreciate red meat.   
He didn't say it, but she saw sheer joy in his face when  
she said she'd die if she didn't have a cheeseburger NOW,  
Mulder.

He hands her the folder and tucks an afghan around  
her--she's never quite warmed up from the chill of early  
pregnancy and autumn in Oregon--before he sits back down on  
the couch. 

"This," she says in the most official voice she can muster,  
"is the result of an amniocentesis. My second, actually."   
She hasn't told him yet about the first, running for her  
life and that of a laboring woman, and she knows it will be  
a while before she can admit that mistake. "We'll need to  
do some more tests when the baby is born, of course, but  
every indication is that this child is perfectly normal."   
He lets out a long breath. 

"And this," she pulls out the fuzzy gray and white image  
from her sonogram, taken a day after Mulder's funeral, "is  
our daughter, Mulder."


End file.
